BAGHDAD - The young man turns to the camera and pleads with his tormentors.

'I'm not a terrorist,' he tells the Iraqi police who surround him. 'I want you to know I am different. But I am not a terrorist.'

To some fundamentalist Iraqi Muslims, Ahmed Sadoun Saleh was worse than a terrorist.

He was gay. He wore his hair long and took female hormones to grow breasts. Amused by his appearance, Iraqi police officers stopped him in December at a checkpoint in a southern Baghdad neighborhood dominated by radical Shiite militias. They groped Saleh and ridiculed him.